Expanded productivity, contested authority: creativity and AI in high-impact research

Abstract This article examines how highly cited scholarship published between 2020 and February 2025 frames the transformation of creativity under the influence of artificial intelligence. To address this question, the study uses a citation-informed targeted review combined with qualitative interpretive synthesis. Records were retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, screened through a PRISMA-informed procedure, and ranked by citation prominence within a de-duplicated pool, resulting in a final corpus of 40 publications. The analysis, conducted in ATLAS.ti through Grounded Theory and the Constant Comparative Method, shows that influential research has moved beyond the binary question of whether AI is creative and toward the broader reorganization of the conditions under which creativity is produced, evaluated, and legitimized. Across the corpus, creativity emerges as a socio-technical assemblage shaped by human-model interaction, institutional gatekeeping, infrastructural asymmetries, and normative conflict. While AI is associated with expanded productivity, rapid iteration, and enlarged possibility spaces, the same literature also reveals recurring tensions around authorship, originality, recognition, labour, bias, access, legitimacy, and sustainability. The article argues that high-impact scholarship does not merely describe AI as transforming creativity; it also helps stabilize influential definitions of creative value, redistribute forms of recognition, and foreground the need to examine how authority, visibility, and material conditions shape which forms of AI-mediated creativity become visible and legitimate.